DEADLINE TO SUBMIT A PAPER: JUNE 30, 2025
The Neil Rosenberg Bluegrass Scholar Award annually recognizes the best bluegrass-related paper accepted by a juried academic conference during the previous year. Beginning in 2025, the criteria has been expanded to include bluegrass music-related theses written for master’s or doctoral degrees. A bluegrass-related thesis must be revised to be no more than 10,000 words.
The deadline to submit a paper or thesis is June 30. Entries may be emailed to review committee chair Ben Krakauer, PhD, at bkrakauer@warren-wilson.edu. Dr. Krakauer is chair of the music department at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina.
Academic scholars eligible for this award include graduate students in MA or PhD programs and recent PhDs (within five years of degree completion). The award’s name honors Bluegrass Hall of Fame member Neil V. Rosenberg, PhD, a noted bluegrass author and historian.
The objective of this award is to grow the academic awareness of bluegrass music by encouraging developing academic scholars to present research of high quality to fellow scholars on any aspect of the genre. The recipient of the Rosenberg Bluegrass Scholar Award, to be announced in early August, will receive a $500 honorarium plus admission to the next IBMA Business Conference and Awards Show.
We are grateful to Paolo Dettwiler, the sponsor of the 2025 Rosenberg Bluegrass Award. Dettwiler, director and manager of North-Western Switzerland Bluegrass & SwissGrass Productions, is a mandolin player who started performing with his father’s band, The Country Pickers, at age 17. A key figure in European Bluegrass, Paolo co-founded the Swiss Bluegrass Music Association (SBMA) in 1994 and initiated the European Bluegrass Network in 1995, which led to the formation of the European Bluegrass Music Association (EBMA). He served on the IBMA board of directors from 1998-2011, and he promoted bluegrass in his role as editor of SBMA’s newsletter and later as publisher of Bluegrass Europe magazine (1989-2011). Paolo holds an MA in History and English from Basel University and specializes in digital learning as a teacher at a business college.
RETURN to June 2025 issue of The Cornerstone.
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